Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Truman Capote’s masterpiece of true-crime literature may not be all that true, according to a man who just won the legal right to try to prove it. The Associated Press reports that Ronald Nye, the son of a Kansas law enforcement agent who investigated the 1959 killings at the heart of Capote’s In Cold Blood, has gotten a court’s permission to publish his father’s
findings--which Nye says contradict Capote’s story.

Those findings have earned new life due to a contradiction of a different sort. The judge who blocked publication of the files in the first place has now reversed his decision in a 2012 case brought by the Kansas attorney general’s office. The AP writes that Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks “ruled Nye’s First Amendment right to publish the material outweigh the government’s interest in maintaining the confidentiality of its investigative records.”

As for the files themselves, the news service reports that they will likely find their way into a book to be written by Nye and author Gary McAvoy.

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